Paper short abstract:

Voice and narrative share certain strengths and limitations: though powerful tools of communication and sense-making, they suit some persons more than others, and fail to capture the inchoate, less orderly aspects of lived life in general.

Paper long abstract:

Giving voice can be an empowering metaphor for opening up a space for another’s perspective, allowing their experience to be noted and attended to. Yet it is also a metaphor that relies, in part, on a particular form of expression. Voice and narrative share some of the same strengths and limitations: they are powerful tools of sense making and communication, but elude some persons more than others and fail to capture less orderly, inchoate aspects of lived life in general. Departing from Strawson’s distinction between ‘episodics’ and ‘diachronics’, I suggest that tendencies to inhabit the moment and to narrativize could be considered as alternate modalities that people often move between. In other words, certain aspects of lived experience push the discursive to the limit, and hence elude voice and narrative alike.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnography of Equine Assisted Therapies for young people, I will suggest that alongside efforts to evoke forms of understanding that are not reliant on ‘voice’, we must maintain an interest in when, why, and how, voicelessness matters.

Paper long abstract:

An ethics of care goes beyond the things that are said about, or to, one another. Equine Assisted Therapies for young people utilise a form of response-able (Haraway, 2008) relatedness that is about noticing, and changing, the way bodies can move one another in space. Ethnographic studies of these, and other, ‘experiential’ therapies could draw us into understandings of personhood, interaction, and ethics that are not couched in the concept of ‘voice’ and its kin-terms ‘coherence’ ‘reason’ and ‘authenticity.’ Yet my point of departure in this debate is concern with rendering non-verbal encounters or experiences into words – ventriloquising – as part of our methodology. Rather than describing non-verbal encounters in our own anthropological analytic language, I suggest studying the complex sphere of ethics that surrounds the articulation of others' experiences within care infrastructures. Medical anthropologists both describe and intervene – these two roles are not always comfortable allies. It is right that we intervene in the historical privileging of ‘voice’ in medical and social scientific logics. This can involve paying deep regard toward non-verbal forms of encounter. But there is a risk that our interventions and innovations could diminish, and/or exasperate, the predicament some people endure of being articulated by others. We must keep items like voicelessness, non-verbality, incoherence, and inarticulacy in view as descriptive and variable ethnographic objects.

Paper short abstract:

I reflect on my own methodological uneasiness about how to record fieldnotes on LIU interactions that I observed at a deaf cultural center in Jordan: in English, Arabic, or something else. Working through these complications of fieldnote-writing is crucial to thinking about voice and representation.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I reflect on my own methodological uneasiness in taking fieldnotes while conducting dissertation fieldwork on assistive technologies for deaf people in Jordan, particularly at a deaf cultural center where I attended events, volunteered, and took classes in Jordanian Sign Language (LIU, from the Arabic lughat al-'ishara al-'urduniyya). Questions of voice and representation become increasingly complex in such multilingual and multimodal spaces where many languages are at play: drawing on their own linguistic repertoires, center staff would interact with each other in a mix of Jordanian Arabic and LIU—and additionally, with me, the hearing and visibly foreign medical anthropologist, in English and, occasionally, American Sign Language. While conducting participant observation at the center over a period of four months, I struggled with whether I should record the interactions in LIU that I observed in English (my first language), in Arabic (the language of Jordan and to which LIU is intimately connected), or something else. If in Arabic, I also had to think about whether to write in Arabic script or in a transliterated form—which was made more complicated by the fact that, unlike in the Latin alphabet, where American Sign Language glosses and English words can be distinguished by capitalisation (e.g. HOME I-GO versus "I am going home"), there is no way to capitalise letters in the Arabic alphabet to distinguish words from glosses. I argue that working through some of these questions about fieldnote-taking methodology are crucial to thinking about broader questions of voicing and non-normative articulation.

Paper short abstract:

The challenge embedded within ethnographic research is that anthropologists are curators of data; we select what speaks to us and leave much to one side because we cannot see it, or because it seems to say less. This tells listeners more about anthropological voices than it does our interlocutors'.

Paper long abstract:

During my doctoral research, my main objective was to understand how the vast minority population of British deaf people listened and were listened to. Throughout my time in the field, I strove to foreground the warm reception of sign language and deaf life-ways in the arts, specifically theatre, which I had witnessed during my professional life and my previous research. I knew, however, that there was another side of British society which belied a reality of constant struggles with inclusion. I found a counterbalance working in an advocacy centre at which I could help sign-users and non-signing deaf people access public services, becoming their voices - literally - as they signed. Through this role I became inextricably entangled with their cases, and with their voices.

This experience highlighted for me the challenge invisibly embedded within anthropological approaches to ethnographic research: whichever methodological approach is chosen necessarily delimits the kind of data one can access. But deeper than that, our outputs are equally pre-filtered - whether in the films, photography, drawings, or ethnographic writing that we produce. These are interpreted and edited at the point of data-collection and again as we work to analyse it. We, as Hage has suggested, are curators of our research; we select what speaks to us and leave much to one side due to time or space restrictions or because the anthropologist simply cannot see it, nor listen to it. As a result our work tells the listener much more about the anthropologists than it does about our interlocutors' voices.

Paper short abstract:

The capacity for an inner voice is a primary means through which people understand and engage with the world. Based on a collaboration with artists with MND, we explore how different life events are mediated by complex layers of inner expression and imagination.

Paper long abstract:

The capacity for an inner voice—that includes streams of internally represented speech, emotional reverie, moral observation and imagination—is a primary means through which people interpret, understand and engage with the world, including in relation to illness and misfortune or when negotiating significant social, religious and moral conflicts and periods of existential disruption and uncertainty. Without inner expression there would be no self-understanding or social existence in any recognisable form. Nevertheless, the social-sciences lack a generally accepted epistemological framework for understanding people’s inner voice and associated modes of internalised expression, including how these inform or relate to people’s public and externally observable actions. People’s inner expressions are often seen as intangible or irrelevant, rather than empirical phenomena directly constitutive of experience, action and understanding.

In response, the proposed contribution to the roundtable, explores the role of inner voice in relation to Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and other life changing experiences and diagnosis. MND is a degenerative condition (the same that Stephen Hawking lived with) that encompasses the loss of the capacities of speech, facial expression and bodily movement, opening up a unique window onto the centrality of inner voice to both experience and expression. Drawing on a collaboration with London based artist with MND Sarah Ezekiel, we explore creative methods and modes of research to better understand the concept of voice and the lifeworlds of illness, including how different life events are mediated by complex modes of inner expression and imagination.